Black Girl
Daniel Joseph
Copyright 2011 by Daniel Joseph
Smashwords Edition
Chapter 1 (November 2006)
I had definitely gone a bit mad. There was no doubt about that. Sometimes my hands shook, sometimes I talked to myself. Nothing felt right. I began to work out the mechanics of how I should do it - a drugs overdose would be best, I decided, with a bottle of whiskey. But I didn't go through with it in the end, purely and simply because I had never been with a black girl.
I drove across to the other side of town to meet up with Elmer. I didn't particularly want to see him, but I suppose I had nothing better to do.. isn't that the reason why anybody ever does anything? It was a clear cold day, a Thursday afternoon.
The part of our town that he lived in, up in the North of England, was a relatively nice place. There were expensive houses, a market, shops, pubs, restaurants, even boutiques. Elmer lived on a cul-de-sac at the top of a little estate, a fairly humble street, but not poor. I parked up outside and went in. I had nothing better to do and he had nothing better to do. Two young men with a little money in our pockets. In that respect, I suppose we were well matched.
Elmer and I had met on ecstasy and instantly become best friends. Like me, he wasn't typical of the males in our town. He had been to Goa and knew all about magic mushrooms, he was a good looking boy, a space cadet type, maybe even a vegetarian, I had thought. We had befriended each other in the club, then kept talking at my sister's house party, then ended up walking around the streets early on the Sunday morning, still talking, unable to stop, smashed on pills, happy..
We had kept the friendship going after the drugs had worn off, by mistake. So I parked up and went into his little house and he showed me through to the backyard. He had bought a lurcher for £60 and a Harris Hawk for £550 since I had last been there. The lurcher looked like Tramp from Lady and the Tramp. Elmer put on a heavy leather glove and brought the Harris Hawk out from the bird coop. It sat there staring at me, an evil looking bastard. It let out a screech. Elmer had a tiny hood for it made from snakeskin, and an £800 tracking device in case it got lost. He paid for everything with credit cards.
We drank a beer and smoked some weed and I drove us around to the pub.
It was a large pub on a country road. The bar was at the front, and there was a dining area which went around to the side. Mostly it was empty. There were a couple of old guys stood at the bar talking about fishing. And a family sat over by the window. Nothing much.
We sat down at a table and drank a pint. Elmer was talking about himself. He was telling me about his money problems.
'But I'm doin' alright,' he said. 'For my age.. if you think about it.. I earn good money, better than you.. I've got a nice bird.. I've got my son.. he's no retard, is he? It could be worse..' He rapped his fist against his chest. 'The thing about me is that I'm a strong character.. do you know what I mean?'
I thought about it for a second. 'Yes,'
He talked to me but I wasn't really listening to what he was saying. I was more interested in the family who were sat over by the window.. they were an old man and old woman, two middle-aged men, a middle-aged woman, and one little girl.. I think they were two grandparents, their three kids, and a granddaughter.. one of the middle-aged men was in a wheelchair and he was wearing some type of breathing apparatus, I could hear him gasping. The whole family were silhouetted by the afternoon sunlight coming in through the window, and there was smoke in the air between them and me.
We ate from the carvery. I had the roast pork and Elmer had the beef. It was mediocre food - it sat there tired under the light, waiting to be eaten. We finished up and bought two more pints. Elmer was talking about his girlfriend. She was submissive and took it up the arse, apparently. That was a necessity, he said.
The waitress came and took our plates away. She was one of those nice middle-aged women, a little bit mad and highly strung. She tried to make a joke but it fell flat. It was an anecdote about how a customer had once ordered ice cream and then complained that his plate was too cold. But the anecdote, or the way that she told it, was a little off key.
Elmer and I both laughed politely. She went away.
'You see I found that all very uncomfortable,' he said. 'That whole conversation, I mean..'
He was right. It had been uncomfortable. I didn't say anything though, as I kind of had a soft spot for the woman. She reminded me of my mother.
We drove back up to his house and smoked some more weed from the bong. I had got myself into just the right state - I could feel my whole body vibrating, but only slightly. I was on the sofa and Elmer was sat on the footstool, looking at the internet. He had a laptop on the coffee table in front of him. He was looking for a van. 'After I've done this plastering course, mate.. and the tiling course.. if I work hard, if I really hammer it.. in the first year I could earn sixty grand.. sixty grand!'
I blew some smoke out. 'That's good money,'
'It is good money, that's right.. How much money are you gonna' earn next year, Paul? What are your career plans?'
'Career plans?'
'Yeah. What are you gonna' do?'
He had turned from the laptop now and he was looking right in my face, very serious. This was why I didn't like having friends.
'I don't know.. sometimes I think I'd like to write something..'
'Write something?' he laughed, kind of snorted, and went back to looking at the computer. 'Well you'll have to think of something very clever, won't you?'
I took another hit from the bong, blew the smoke out again, and looked at the television. 'Yes.'
There was a children's television show on, called The Giggle Twins. The Giggle Twins were two older northern guys, with craggy faces, dressed in brightly coloured baggy clothing. One of them was slightly shorter and acted slightly stupider than the other. The taller one was in charge. Their act was a kind of substandard vaudeville slapstick, and each week the storyline of the show would accommodate this. This week they were window cleaners. Some old boy hired them to clean his windows, and the hilarity began - falling down ladders, dropping buckets, etc. They came to some plan together, to outwit the old boy. 'Got that Harry?!' the taller one said, holding a deliberately gormless smile on his face.
'Got that Ernie!' said the other one, mirroring the expression.
The Giggle Twins came from the same town as me. One of them (the taller one) lived in my village. He had a large house and drove a Mercedes. The short one also had money.
Something about them depressed me terribly. Was it jealousy? Was I pissed off that they had made all that money, got rich from the BBC, while I was made to work hard for my few pounds per hour?
No, it wasn't that..
It was their mediocrity which depressed me. I felt sorry for the children who had to watch the show, the crew who had to work on it, even the old actor who was playing the owner of the house.. probably when he started out he wanted to be the next Olivier - and now it had come to this.
Clearly, weed was not the right drug for me anymore. The weed and The Giggle Twins were working horribly together, sending me into a tailspin of bad thoughts. Their two faces were heightened, staring out at me from the screen, grinning as though they were sharing some terrible secret..
'Shall we go out?' I said. To Elmer. 'Shall we go out for a while?'
Later on, when it got dark, we did go out. We drove into the countryside, onto a farmer's land, down lanes, and then we were walking out over fields.
We had the lurcher with us. Tramp. He padded along besides me, shivering in the dark. I liked Tramp. I liked his quietness. Elmer hated him. 'He's a fucking idiot,' he said. 'He'll fuck it up tonight, you watch..'
But every dog has his day, I thought.
We walked silently for ten minutes, until we were right out in the middle of nowhere. Then we came to a huge field lined on all four sides with trees. We walked out towards the centre of the field. Elmer had a hunting lamp. Periodically, he shone the lamp, looking for rabbits.
He found one. He got it in the beam and we set off walking towards it, slowly. It didn't run as I had thought it would do. It just sat there, cowering, shivering in the wind while the bright light got bigger. We were within a few feet, then we were right on top of it. Elmer had Tramp by the collar, and the rabbit was now illuminated underneath him in a bright circular spotlight, but the dog was looking left, looking right, looking everywhere but down.. then he saw it.. Elmer let go of him and he bit hard into the rabbit's back leg.. but he fucked it up, just like Elmer had said he would.. he let go for a second, and the rabbit ran for its life.
The dog went after the rabbit. They were both very fast. The rabbit bolted in a straight line, then when it got towards the edge of the field it arced slightly to the left. Elmer held the beam on the two of them - the dog and rabbit. Then he lost them. Two seconds later there was a squealing noise, the rabbit was caught.
We ran over to them. Tramp had the thing in his mouth, and it was squealing and kicking. 'Tramp! Here boy!' The dog wouldn't immediately come to Elmer, so they ended up chasing around in circles for five minutes. Then Elmer did catch hold of Tramp, but he wouldn't give up the rabbit. Elmer got hold of its back legs, Tramp had the front legs, and the two of them ragged it around for a moment, still alive. Elmer shouted at the dog. He hit him hard across the face. But Tramp still wouldn't let go - he was snarling, baring his teeth, he had gone primal.. just for one moment, that dog really believed in himself.
After that he didn't catch any more. Elmer slipped him on another five or six rabbits, but the dog missed them all, his form getting worse and worse.
We went down to the farmer's barn and shot some rats with the air rifle. The rats were smarter than the rabbits, but we still managed to get a few of them. We shone the light and they scattered over the piles of corn and along the wooden dividers. 'Do you want to have a go?' Elmer asked me.
'Yeah,'
There was one rat just visible through a tiny hole in the wall. It was actually on the outside of the barn. I took aim and got it in the sights. Elmer shone the light. 'Now!' he said. I fired and got it. Straight through the hole and in its head. 'Not bad! Not bad for your first go!'
We walked out into the farmyard looking for more rats, trudging through the mud and shit. Then we saw one. It was perched up on the edge of a trailer, eating some corn, just sat there looking at us. We got it in the beam and it didn't move. I aimed the rifle, fired, and got it in the side. It fell backwards into the trailer. 'Do you think it's dead?'
Then it was thrashing around in there, with some ferocity. It went quiet, then thrashed around again for a few more seconds, this time with a little less ferocity, then went quiet again. We clambered up onto the side of the trailer. There was some torn blue tarpaulin, and the rat was under there. I could hear it breathing. Elmer jumped in. He walked slowly up to the rat, then stamped hard on it three times. 'Now it is,'
We went back to the barn and stood there silently for a moment in the darkness, listening. I still had the gun. We were stood in front of one of the piles of corn. I tapped the barrel of the gun against the corn, the way they do in war films, when they are checking if somebody is still alive. We both laughed, then tried to stifle it. 'What did you do that for?'
'I don't know, I just felt like it..'
We heard a slight noise over on the other side of the barn. There was a rat, quite a distance away, sitting up on top of one of the piles of corn. 'Here, you have a go..' Elmer shot it. He was a good shot. But the thing was still writhing around up there, not dead. We moved in closer and shot it again. But still it didn't die. We climbed up onto the corn and we were right on top of it, the rat looking up at us, paralysed, blinded by the light, breathing hard with two red puncture wounds in its side. I got no pleasure from seeing it suffer like that. I got no pleasure from watching it die. The truth is, I actually felt sorry for the poor fucker. He shot it one last time, at point blank range in the head, and finally it was dead. 'Leave it there,' he said. 'The others will eat it.'
Chapter 2 (November 2006)
The next evening I went over to visit my grandmother. She had fallen in the street and broken her arm a few days previously. They had put her into an old people's home until she recovered.
The place was up on a hill, overlooking the city. I parked and walked over to the door. There she was, just lighting a cigarette, alone outside the front door. She saw me. It took a moment for her to register who I was. 'Paul! Paul, dear! How wonderful!'
We sat there talking and smoking, looking down at the city lights. It was very peaceful up there and very cold. It was alright.
We went inside. Inside, it was as warm as Jamaica. A few staff were wandering around, and a few old folks with zimmer frames. It was a huge old Victorian place with high ceilings and old-fashioned paintings on the walls. We went through and sat in the front sitting room.
'How is your grandfather, dear? Have you seen him?'
'Yeah. He's fine.'
I had been to see my grandfather the week before. He had sat there in his chair, very old but still smiling. He had become weak.
My grandmother and I sat in that strange old room together, she was losing it in the head slightly, and all she could do was wait around and pray that me or somebody else would turn up and visit her, just to break up the day a little bit.
We had the front room of the old people's home to ourselves for about an hour. I steered the conversation away from my grandfather and I got her talking about the days when she used to run the pubs, back in her heyday.
Then the staff brought these three old women in, ancient, deathly, hunched over in wheelchairs. They wheeled them to a table and the three of them ate, slowly and in silence. My grandmother said, 'You see that old lady there, Paul.. she hasn't had a single visitor in all of the last week that I've been here.. but I've had visitors every night.. I feel so sorry for her..'
After the old women had finished eating, two staff came back into the room and put the three of them in easy chairs, over by the front window. They lifted them by the armpits, one on each side, and the old women's feet dragged against the carpet as they were taken across. Then the staff were gone and there was absolute quiet again. The three old women sat there staring into nothing. My grandmother and I sat there looking at them, trying not to look at them.
'You remember that I used to like a drink, don't you Paul?'
'Yeah. Course I do.'
'I'm not allowed to drink now, because of all these tablets that I'm on..'
'I know, nan..'
'Well the next time you have a drink, love.. think about me.. and order yourself another one!'
When I came out of that place I wanted strong liquor. And a woman.
I had not been with a woman in two years.
It was dark and frosty. I drove to a shop and bought a bottle of vodka and a paper. Then I sat in the car at a McDonalds car park, drinking, looking through the prostitute adverts. I had had enough of trying to meet women in bars and clubs. There were women advertised in my town and the next town and the cities right down to the Midlands. After three or four good swigs of the vodka, I could feel the devilment in me rising. I started calling the numbers.
The first few either didn't answer, or did answer but I couldn't make any sense of them. Then I spoke to a woman in Derby, and she said there was a Mediterranean woman available there.
I set off driving. For some reason I drove through the centre of the city, through the teeming traffic, en-route to the motorway. As the liquor first hit me it felt good, driving along, with music playing.
Then I was motoring down the M1, heading south down the middle of the country.
The woman had told me that I needed to turn into Derby and take the first left at the roundabout after the hospital. I drove along the motorway and then the streets, drinking. By the time I found the hospital I was roaring drunk. And the combination of the booze and my nerves had made me need to shit quite urgently.
I parked at the hospital and walked into the accident & emergency area. It was dark, after eight pm. Nobody was around there. I went into the disabled toilet. It was a good toilet, clean, pristine, just what I needed. Right at that moment, I wanted the toilet more than I wanted the Mediterranean woman. I sat down and evacuated my bowels with an explosive shit. Then I cleaned myself up, washed my hands, and walked back out into the night.
A police car was parked just outside the accident & emergency doors, with two policemen in it. They looked at me. I looked back at them, nodded, and kept walking.
Just before I got to the car, I called the woman again. I told her I was five minutes away. 'Lovely,' she said.
Here I come, Mediterranean woman.
I was really quite confused by now from the booze. I had drained the last of the vodka just as I had pulled into the hospital car park. It had lasted just under an hour.
The woman had said take the first left after the hospital, the first left again, and you were on the road - it was number 84 Cooper Avenue. But when I turned left and left again it brought me onto Cooper Street, not Cooper Avenue. I drove all around there and there was no Cooper Avenue. I tried calling her again, three times, but she didn't answer. Finally I decided that she must have meant Cooper Street, not Avenue. I parked outside number 84 and knocked on the door. It was a red brick council estate, quite poor, and I was parked on what appeared to be the main road through it. A young woman came and opened the door. She was white, quite rough, wearing a tee-shirt and jogging suit bottoms. At first I thought she must have been one of the other working girls. 'I'm here to see the Mediterranean woman,' I said.
'What?' she said, and looked at me as though I was crazy. I was crazy.
I backed away from her, heading for my car, and stumbled as I got to the kerb. The girl just kept standing there at the open door, staring at me. I found my keys, got in the car, and quickly drove away from there.
As I drove back up north I was already starting to feel sober. I was mildly distressed at the scene which had just occurred - that girl had seemed traumatised by me. I didn't know what kind of person I had become, knocking on doors and asking about Mediterranean women, scaring rough girls on council estates.. I felt that things would improve once I got back to home ground.
Whilst I was still driving along I started calling the numbers for girls in my town. One of the adverts was for a French Caribbean girl. A London woman answered. She had a sexy voice, and she used it on me.
'Do you have a Caribbean girl?' I asked.
'The Caribbean girl? She's in with a service at the moment, she'll be about twenty minutes.. it's £60 for half an hour or £80 for a full hour.. and the thing is.. if you stay for the full hour.. you can fuck her as many times as you like.. if you're greedy, that is.. are you greedy?' I said something, I don't remember what. But it was a bad connection so she didn't hear me right. 'What? You are greedy? You are, aren't you?' she said, laughing.
This time I found the place without any trouble at all. It was on an expensive red brick housing development overlooking a man-made lake. My biggest fear was that I might get seen going into the house by one of the neighbours, and that they might confront me, somehow.
I parked up and went over to the door, rang the bell, and waited there. I waited for at least a minute. I heard a car coming up the street. It slowed almost to a stop right behind me, then took off again.
A fat middle-aged man answered the door. He had grey hair and dark eyes. Something about him disturbed me quite badly. He looked at me then looked away. 'Hello there,' he said, very quietly, and beckoned me into the house.
I stepped into the hallway and he closed the door behind me. Then I followed him to the stairs. As I did so I looked over to my right and through a doorway, where I could see a living room and open-plan kitchen. A Thai girl was stood there in lingerie, by the sofa. She smiled at me and I smiled back. I thought that she looked old beyond her years, and strangely, that she looked like a Thai version of my first girlfriend.
The man lead me into a bedroom on the first floor. 'If you'd just like to wait here for a moment,' he said, very quietly again, almost whispering, 'make yourself comfortable..' And then he was gone.
He was very quiet. The whole house was very quiet - as though everybody there thought that if we all just snuck around, nobody would know what we were doing. In the bedroom there was a two seater sofa and a double bed. I stood there waiting.. waiting for what? I heard quiet footsteps. First coming towards me and then moving away from me. A moment later I heard more footsteps, and two girls, talking.
A dark skinned black girl walked into the room, wearing high heeled shoes and purple lingerie. This was what I had been waiting for.. for months, for nearly two years. She was only halfway pretty but she acted as though she was gorgeous. I wanted her straight away. She flashed big brown eyes at me, and white teeth. She made eye contact for one second, turned, pushed her backside out so I could get a good look, and walked back out to the landing, out of my sight.
The Thai girl came to the doorway. The girl whom I had seen downstairs. But she was too shy. Instead of walking in and posing as the black girl had done, she just kind of stood there and giggled for a second, then turned and walked back out.
The black girl came back in, and smiled at me.
'Which do you want?'
I pointed at her. 'You.'
She took my hand and lead me up to the third floor. There was another bedroom up there. It was a large room with a double bed. I stood to one side for a moment, rather awkwardly. She sat down on the bed and invited me to sit down next to her. We made the deal - £80 for one hour, she would cost me. She brought some wine and we stayed in there together for a while. She was calling herself Nisha.
I laid on the bed and she undressed in front of me. Her skin was as black as mine was white. She stood over me and I looked up at her shaven cunt. 'Is that pretty?' she asked me.
'Yes,'
'I hope you've got a good hard fuck for me darling, it's not easy to get a decent shag nowadays, even in my line of work..' I had never been spoken to that way before. I liked it. I had an erection already, and she knelt down on the bed in front of it. 'You sure you can hold it, darling?'
'I'm sure,'
'You're gonna' give me chance to get my hot lips around it? You gonna' stick this big thing inside me?'
Oh Jesus, baby.. Nisha!
She went down on me, slowly, taking the whole length of my dick in her mouth, swallowing it right down to her throat, holding it there, then pulling back and gasping for breath. She did that until I was covered with her spit. Then she looked up at me, and slapped my dick on her tongue.
£80.. I had been waiting all my life for a fuck like this and all it had finally cost me was £80.
She sat down on my dick and bounced on me, hard and slow at first, then getting faster, with perfect rhythm. I hoped that some of that rhythm might transfer from her groin into mine. I fucked her on her side, fucked her on all fours, fucked her all over the bed.. and all the time she kept talking to me.. 'I like you.. I like being with you, it feels right.. get it right up inside me, fuck me harder with it.. smack me! Smack me and tell me I'm a bad girl!'
I pinned her down on the bed and pushed her legs right back. Then I rammed it into her hard. I thought about the money I had paid her, and how many other men she might have been with that day, and I fucked her. I kissed her roughly on the cheek. She was a London girl, around twenty five years old, with a tight weave and gold hooped earrings. I could smell her perfume. I thought, we've never met before, Nisha, and we'll probably never meet again, but we're here, now, we're alive and we're fucking each other.
I was twenty nine years old.
Afterwards, we got talking. She laid there naked on the bed with her legs crossed high, smoking a cigarette. I took one of her cigarettes. She said, 'I am not ashamed of what I am, darling.. I am a prostitute.. go ahead.. you can say it! I am not ashamed! I will stand on top of the lampposts and shout it out! Darling, when I am older.. when I sit there with my grandkids I will say 'Darlings, come here, gather round, 2006 was the greatest year of my life.. because that was the year I finally got clean!' I had a coke problem, yeah? I used to be with this guy in London, right? This rich guy, he was a property developer, yeah? He had a penthouse apartment.. a Ferrari.. he picked me up one day.. I was just sitting in a bus stop and he pulled up in this Ferrari and said 'Do you want a lift?' I was like 'What.. who are you?' But that's how we met, yeah? But he took too much coke.. then I took too much coke.. I had to go into therapy, darling..'
Nisha had poor tits. But the rest of her was good. She liked to talk about herself, and that was okay with me.
'My dad.. he's a millionaire.. he gave me a flat in London worth £300,000! I can have a job with him any time I like.. but we can't get along, we're too alike.. My dad's Jamaican, he's headstrong, and so am I.. I told him, I told him what I do..' She laughed, looked to the side, put one hand in the air. 'I told all my family! I told them! That's why they don't talk to me now.. none of them talk to me! But you know what? ..it doesn't matter what they think, only God can judge me.. that's what I say.. Are you religious, darling?'
'No,'
'Well I am.. And I read the Bible every night, yeah? You know Mary Magdalene from the Bible? Did you know that she was a prostitute, also? My family can't judge me, no way! I am not ashamed! All I have to do is give this up, and my dad says I can work for him.. he'll pay me £1000 a week to work in his office! I can do office work you know, I've got a business degree.. But I won't work for him, no way.. I won't give him the satisfaction! I don't need my family.. This is my family, now.. You're my family.. John downstairs is my family..'
'The guy who let me in? The old guy?'
'Yes! He came and got me yesterday! He drove down and brought me from London! I replied to an advert in the back of the paper! I just called this number and he came and got me! Don't you just love it, darling?! Don't you love it?! We're here in this secret world.. this secret life.. and people don't know what we do! We walk down the street and they look at us, those normal people, and they don't know what we really do.. it's so delicious, darling, don't you think?'
We talked for another two hours, covering a lot of ground very quickly. Her latest boyfriend was a footballer from London, with blonde hair and blue eyes, just like me. He earned £9,000 per week, she said. But she didn't have time for love right now. Many of her clients became infatuated with her. There was a bank manager who lavished gifts on her and gave her the use of his villa in Goa. And a young guy from my town who had been to see her twice already since she had arrived - once before rugby training and once after.
She talked on and on. At one point she pulled a knife out from behind the headboard and said, 'I would fuck somebody up, if they ever started anything with me! I would take a cut if I had to! I'm a blue belt in karate, you know..' She was quite mad, of course. Not that I blamed her for that. She was doing a mad job in a mad world, and she had created this character as a way to cope with it all, I think.. Nisha.
The phone rang a couple of times and she answered it, putting on the flirtatious voice, but no more customers came. We kept talking. She was in a strange town, with that strange man downstairs. She wanted someone to talk to just as much as I did. We talked for so long that the persona of Nisha began to slip. She became a different girl. Before, she had carefully over pronounced her words, and smiled almost constantly, giving her accent a tinge of what almost sounded like Australian mixed with a little Jamaican. But now she was pure South London. Her face was longer when she didn't smile, and a little sullen. She put her number into my phone. Her real name was Paula.
She lit another cigarette. And looked at me. 'Where is your girlfriend? Where is she tonight?'
'I don't have a girlfriend,'
'You don't have a girlfriend?! Are you joking?! I thought you said you did?!'
'I never said that.'
'We've got to get you a girl, Jesus boy.. you're handsome you know! You've got beautiful eyes.. but you don't use them right!' She stood up in front of me, still naked, smoking the cigarette, and began strutting around the room, giving me a talk, demonstrating how to pick up girls in clubs. 'We used to go out in London every single night, yeah? ..me and my girls.. and you should see the guys flocking around us! You should come out with us sometime, you know, see for yourself.. listen, if you want to meet a girl, yeah? If you want a girl.. the first thing to remember is to ignore her.. guaranteed, if I'm out in a club.. the one motherfucker who ignores me is the one that I want.. listen.. make eye contact with her, but make sure that you look away first.. then go away to a different part of the club - so that she misses you. Then you come back.. you're stood over here with your drink, yeah, by the bar.. she's sat over here with her friends.. you make eye contact again.. then she moves away from her friends, and comes and stands over here on her own.. now it's time to be a man and approach her..' She affected the type of stance that a South London black man might take, and spoke in the same manner. 'You say 'Listen darling, I just wanted to tell you you're lookin' gorgeous tonight.. I know that this ain't the best place for two people to talk, but if you want to give me your number I could call you in the week and we can get to know each other..' Don't try to be too funny, don't try to be too clever.. simple words, darling.. simple words are all you need.
Simple words. Yeah.
I watched this South London black girl, moving about the room. She had a tattoo which covered the whole front of her left thigh. She had said that I should get a tattoo also, a small love heart on my left hand, to show that I had a caring side. And that I should wear an ear stud.. and that I should always carry at least £300 cash in my wallet. This girl was trying to help me. She lived in the same shit world as the rest of us, inhabiting an even worse space than I did, and yet here she was trying to help me! Sometimes people can suprise you like that. Paula.. she wanted to find a girlfriend for me, like that might be the answer to something. She didn't know what she was up against.
My alcohol levels had dropped considerably since I had stumbled on the pavement outside that house in Derby. But I was still well drunk. The wine that Paula had brought me tipped me back over the edge again. It was hazy in that room, and quiet, with a low light. I had half a spliff left and I smoked it. She went back to being Nisha again. She sat right behind me and kissed me gently on the shoulder. And she said, 'You've been working too hard, darling.. you should let me take care of you..'
I dressed. She wrapped a bath towel around herself and walked me down to the door. We stood there listening for a few seconds to make sure there was nobody outside. I kissed her. 'Take care,'
'Take care,'
I meant it, just at that moment. And just at that moment, I think she did too.
Then I drove home, drunk, stoned, paranoid, across town.
There was nobody around at all.
Chapter 3 (November 2006)
Work was a grey office. I earned £1000 per month. I was in the Tech Support department, right at the bottom of the food chain.
IT guys sat at their desks in long rows. Each row of desks was more senior than the last until you got to the far side of the office, where the Web Developers sat. The Web Developers were superior to everybody else.
Sometimes I would have to go over and ask them about something.
They sat, mostly not speaking, staring at their computer screens.
The company dealt in data.
One of the Web Developers wore shades and a baseball cap. Another had a pony tail slightly tinged with green. But most of them wore jumpers and looked as though they had never experienced a day of real fun in their entire lives.
The worst of them was called Steve Dixon. He had the reputation of being totally unapproachable - nobody wanted to speak to him. One day, before I had been there long enough to know any better, the man who was training me sent me over to him with a query. I think he did it for spite.
I walked up to Dixon. He was a thin man with brown hair and he had developed a crick in his neck from all those years of staring at computer screens. I stood next to him and he ignored me. 'Steve?' Still he ignored me.
I kept waiting there. The worst thing was not that I was so far beneath these men. The worst thing was that they themselves were so absolutely mediocre. They didn't drive BMW's and Mercedes' - they drove Ford Mondeos and Vauxhall Cavaliers. Dixon was wearing a green nylon shirt and there was a David Gray cd on the desk in front of him. Finally he turned and looked at me, with a blank expression. I handed him the sheet of paper I had been holding and asked him about the query, as instructed. He looked at it. Then he placed the sheet of paper on his desk, stood up, and began practising his golf swing - holding an imaginary club, taking a shot, and looking off into the distance to see where the ball had gone. After three of four swings he handed the sheet of paper back to me and said, 'I don't know what you're talking about,'
'Okay. Thanks.'
His voice was very weak, there was no power in it at all. I turned away from him and walked back to my desk.
Chapter 4 (Drinking)
From my teenage years to my early twenties, I went through a long period of semi-reclusiveness. I only really started venturing out into the world when I started drinking.
The alcohol blew my brains out. I could not handle it at all.
I used to go around the town centre on Thursday nights. It was a terrible place. The music was terrible and the people were terrible. They played this kind of hard Euro trance, usually some girl singing an epic chorus over synthesizers, then a manic beat kicking in. The young men and women of the town laughed and danced and felt one another. They were mostly pale and ugly. They seemed to be happy.
I had a deep feeling, from way down inside myself, that I did not belong there with them. Yet still I kept going. On Thursday nights the shots of vodka cost fifty pence each, so I bought two trebles at a time, and always made sure to stay shitfaced drunk.
One week I was waiting there alone and a girl came and sat down next to me. She was pretty with short blonde hair. She put her leg over mine. We sat there. I didn't speak to her, paranoid that she might be taking the piss. It seemed too good to be true - a pretty girl like that just coming up to me. A boy came and spoke to her and they went away together.
Then one week I was standing there. In a club. A girl approached and started French kissing me. We went off to the side and sat down. She straddled me and we continued kissing. Her front teeth grated against mine. I didn't like kissing her. She didn't taste nice. We kissed for five minutes. Then we got up off the seat, and for the first time I got a good look at her. She had acne and she was ugly. She was so ugly that I felt sorry for her. My face must have dropped. 'What's wrong, darling?' she said.
'Nothing.'
I got away from her and soon she was straddling another boy.
I stood there alone again. I had drunk so much vodka that I couldn't think straight. I started dancing. To the hard Euro trance. I think that was the first time I had ever danced in my life.
I felt someone pull on my shoulder and turned to look at them. It was two bouncers, one black and one white. Both men were huge. The white man was staring at me as though he wanted to bite my nose off. I was terrified of him. The black man had dreadlocks. He pulled me by the arm and made me sit down on a step, then stood over me. He spoke in a deep northern accent. He smelled of stale sweat. 'You cunt,' he said. 'When I tell you to do somethin', you fuckin' do it, alright?' I nodded. 'Now.. fuck off!'
I fucked off. I walked out of the club, through the town centre, out into the surrounding streets. I walked and walked and walked. I was going to nowhere in particular. At one point I found myself in the red light district. I looked across and saw two prostitutes looking at me, standing outside a house. Either laughing at me or just laughing in general. They looked like two sisters, heroin addicts, the living dead. I walked away from them until I was alone again.
Chapter 5 (Drugs)
I started going to the drugs clubs with my sisters, around in the different cities.
One Saturday night Tara and I went over to Niche. But we came out of there very early, at around two am. For some reason Tara had decided that we would drive down to London to try and find her friend. We went around to the nearest petrol station, to fill up the car. In the streets surrounding Niche, people hung around in cars, smoking weed. And they were also parked at the petrol station.
A black man came over to my window. He was midnight black and he wore a doo-rag on his head, an American football shirt, and black leather gloves. He knocked on the window and I wound it down. 'Yeah.. gimme a tape..' he said.
I was heavily under the influence of ecstasy. It felt great. 'A tape?' I said, and started rummaging through the glove compartment, 'What type of music do you like?'
That threw him. He had come over to rob me, but I was so full of goodwill that I hadn't realised it, even enquiring as to what kind of music he preferred.. as though he might like Phil Collins or Celine Dion or something like that.. to be honest I was one step away from getting out of the car and hugging him.
'Erm.. Niche music..' he said.
I gave him the tape and he walked away smiling, looking a little confused.
My sister and I took more pills on the drive down to London. It was a long drive. And it was strong ecstasy. We had a small fridge in the back of the car and I kept pouring drinks for us. Tara was on soft drinks and I was on spirits. Outside it was raining, but in that car we were warm and safe. We turned up the music, kept laughing, and hurtled along.
London is a good place to drive around when you are on drugs. There is always something to look at, and somebody to interact with. We drove through Piccadilly Circus. A London cabbie was driving next to us. We were dancing to the music, and he started dancing to the music also. 'GO ON MY SAN!!' he shouted to me, bopping his shoulders. 'LAAVERLY!!'
Tara could get no answer from her friend. So we parked at a petrol station and made a series of frantic calls to different people, then set off driving back up north again.
By seven am we were on the outskirts of Nottingham. We had made good time, although we hadn't actually been to anywhere in particular. We came to a main roundabout and two black men were broken down in a car, stranded in the middle of the road. One of them was a dark skinned African guy, quite short, dressed like the rapper 50 Cent. Tara stopped the car and I got out and ran over to him. We pushed the broken down car onto a wide pavement, underneath an underpass. 'Thanks man!' he said to me. They were on drugs. They had been to Niche.
Feeling over confident from the ecstasy, for some reason I decided to take control of the situation. The black men made the mistake of going along with me. I could see steam coming up from underneath the bonnet. 'It needs water,' I said to the African 50 Cent guy.
'It needs water?' he repeated.
Tara drove me to a filling station, a couple of miles down the road. A teenage girl was on duty, just coming to the end of her night shift. I knocked on the glass and she opened the door. 'You haven't got any water, have you?! I'm off my head, I've been to Niche an' London.. this guy's broke down over there an' I need some water for his car!' She laughed and brought some old bottles of water from the back. 'Thank you!'
On the drive back to the black guys, Tara said, 'Just give 'em the water an' leave it, you know.. don't try an' start the car now or it'll crack the head an' fuck it completely.. they need to let it cool right down..'
That wasn't enough for me.. I wanted to get those black boys moving again, I wanted the glory!
I got back to them. The driver was a light skinned young guy, stoned and sleepy, with a long face and a hangdog expression. I sat down in the passenger seat and he looked at me as though he couldn't really work me out. I was wired, wide-eyed, grinding my jaw.. 'It was good of you to come back, man..' he mumbled.
'Yeah, no worries mate.. no worries at all!' I went around to the front of the car with 50 Cent and opened the bonnet. I unfastened the water cap and steam shot up, scolding my hand. But I didn't feel it. I poured the water in. Then I closed the bonnet again and went back round to the driver. 'Right mate, we'll push.. once you get going put it into second, an' start the engine, yeah?'
'Are you sure?'
'Yes mate!'
I think the driver suspected (quite correctly) that I didn't really know what I was doing.. but 50 Cent.. 50 Cent really had faith in me..
50 Cent and I went around to the back of the car and started pushing. When we got the car rolling I shouted, 'NOW!!'
'NOW!' 50 Cent repeated.
'START IT NOW AND KEEP GOING!!'
'START IT NOW AND KEEP GOING!!'
The engine spluttered into life, faltered, then started again and the car took off round the roundabout, out of our sight.. I had done it, I had actually done it! 50 Cent and I walked back to where we had started from. And when we got there the car was parked in exactly the same spot again underneath the underpass, with steam coming up from the bonnet even worse than before. The driver looked at me with that same hangdog expression, his car was completely fucked. I got back into Tara's car and we carried on our way, leaving them stranded there.
There was a pub in this rough little town just outside of Nottingham which hosted an after hours rave. We were parked outside the pub. It was still raining, and the daylight made everything grim.
A vicious looking mixed race guy stood on the door, wearing a tracksuit. And there was a white guy standing next to him who looked relatively civilized. Tara got the mixed race guy, I got the white guy. He told me to raise my arms so he could pat me down. Then, without patting me down, he told me to drop my arms. Then he told me to raise them again. I did as instructed, stupefied by the drugs. 'Good lad!' he said. He was a cunt.
Then we came to a desk where two young girls were sat, student types, giggling and wide-eyed. We paid them and went in.
It was a big old pub which had obviously seen better days. There was a long bar, a dancefloor, a DJ booth, a raised seated area with black leather sofas, and stacks of chairs piled all around. Well, they had Niche music playing and the windows were blacked out. That was enough for me. I sat down by the bar. I still didn't like to dance back then, it being towards the beginning of my raving career. We stayed there for the next few hours.
There were no more than thirty people in the rave. Around eight black men were stood in a row, spaced out along the length of the bar. They wore baseball caps and long jackets. Tara knew them quite well. The main one was called Tiny, and he was also the shortest of them. He stood at the centre of the bar. Tara had introduced me to him when we first arrived. I had smiled at him and nodded. He had just looked at me, without smiling or speaking, and nodded his head slightly.
Tiny stood there, leaning back against the bar, watching. He only danced once all night, and even then it was only for a few seconds.. he kind of skipped forwards two steps, swung his arm around low to the ground, spun right round, then went back to leaning against the bar. The eight of them left after only an hour or so. I later heard that they came back the next week with guns, and robbed the place. That was the end of that particular rave. I hope they got the white guy on the door when they did it.
The atmosphere improved slightly once the gang of black men left. And Lizi arrived. Lizi had the most fantastic ass - it was big, round, it really did have to be seen to be believed. She wore tight black jeans and they were wrapped around that ass. She went out at the hips, in at the waist, then out again into the biggest chest that I had ever seen. She was a real life Jessica Rabbit - it was as though God had put her body together first, then made less of an effort with all the other women who came afterwards. She had long dark hair, an Italian complexion. I just sat there looking at her. I knew that I would never get to be with her, of course.
Looking back, I'm sure that I must have been staring at her for a lot of the time. Especially seeing as though I had just started taking ecstasy, and it was hitting me so hard. She wore a low cut purple top which pushed those tits out even further. She danced in front of me, pushing out her ass, tormenting me.
I sat there in the darkness and the smoke, watching her, watching everybody.
The nights out on drugs lasted for so long.. all night.. all night and all of the next day.. then all of the next night as well, then sometimes into day two and day three.. the tiredness and the hunger heightened the drugs, made you feel even more deluded.
Lizi came across and sat on my knee. She planted a big kiss on me.
'What do you do, Lizi? I asked her.
'I'm a singer, a model, and a receptionist!' She spoke in the most ridiculous high pitched voice. 'I'm making a song! Dizzee Rascals gonna' record it with me! It goes, 'Love oh love/Never did feel this good/Barely in my twenties/Oh love oh love..'
Then she went into a kind of rap. Every time I saw her she said she was going to record that song, and that Dizzee Rascal was interested in working with her. It was a terrible song.
There was one woman walking around the rave who had the typical hollowed-out face of a whizzhead, she was frantically doing circuits around the pub, just walking around and around..
And an unpleasant looking gorilla of a chav in a tracksuit and thick gold chains, and a younger chav, skinny, sat over on the speakers on his own, drinking, smoking weed, pumping his fist to the music and having the time of his life.
The music was deafening. The tune played -
'Drinking Chardonnay..'
'Sippin' on Alize..'
'We came to party..'
'Night and day..'
Two young women were there with their mother. The mother was thin with dark hair, well into her fifties, and fucked on pills and alcohol. The two daughters were both nice girls. One of them was blonde and the other was brunette. The brunette girl was very attractive, quiet with good manners. Her mother was laughing, smiling, delirious from the drugs. Her head rolled back and her mouth was open. She put her arm around me, fell into me, and kissed me on the mouth. I could feel cold saliva running down her chin.
A black man walked up to me and started talking. He was quite tall, and good looking, but when he opened his mouth I saw that he had rotten stumps instead of teeth. He asked me for a light. I gave it to him. He talked too close to me, spraying my face with spittle. 'Yo,' he said, 'the bouncer asked me why I'm here with all these women, yo, and guess what I told him?' I shrugged my shoulders. He was referring to Lizi, and the handful of girls she was with. They were lapdancers. 'I told him I'm a pimp, yo.. and these are all my bitches! What do you think about that?!'
I pulled a face as though I was impressed. He leaned back against the bar, lit a cigarette, and just for a moment he was happy in his world.. the pimp with his bitches. He wore a smart white tee-shirt and new-looking blue jeans, but I got the feeling they were the only clothes that he owned.
Hours passed. Things got more and more hazy. Tara and I snorted some cocaine from the corner of a credit card. That was the first time in my life that I had ever snorted anything.
I looked over to my right. Lizi was sitting on a sofa with the black man who had rotten teeth. He was around twenty years older than her, well into his forties. She had her legs crossed and she was rubbing her foot against his foot. He put his arm around her, said something into her ear. She laughed and moved in closer. Then his hand was on her ass and his tongue was pushing into her mouth.
Later on she stood in a doorway over to my left and wound her body, silhouetted in the frame. Then she strutted out onto the dancefloor hand in hand with one of her lapdancer friends - this girl who we used to call Lara Croft. Lara Croft wore a short red dress showing her legs and her tits and most of her back. And red shoes and she flashed red knickers. She was kind of like a mixed race version of Angelina Jolie, but fucked up on drugs, and with a little more weight on. Sometimes you looked at her and she was scary, then sometimes you looked at her and she was beautiful.
The two women really owned that dancefloor. The sex oozed out of them, they weren't interested in anybody else but themselves. They both had long black hair, and it fell over their faces. I watched them through the haze and the lights. That was when I loved drugs - when they made everything cinematic like that.
Shortly after eleven am we all left the pub and drove in a convoy to the flat where the black man lived. The man who had told me he was a pimp. He had a blue Golf, nearly as old as mine. He drove at the head of the queue. Lizi was in the passenger seat of the Golf with him, and a white couple were in the back. Lara Croft was behind him with a car full of lapdancers. Behind them there were a car full of black boys from Birmingham. Tara and I were following behind the black boys. And there was a lone white man in a beat up old Mondeo, who had one of the strangest faces I had ever seen - it was almost concave. He was gurning, smiling, he kept overtaking the full line of cars, then pulling to the side and falling to the back, then overtaking everybody again. And he was driving along with his head sticking out of the side window, like a dog catching the wind.
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